This set of slides is for architects and how they can think about installing solar or specifying solar on buildings. That is starting to be asked for more and more by customers when they're building new. At this point, there is solar for residential, there is solar for commercial. Just so you know, there's a lot of talk about solar shingles. Solar shingles, which replace regular roofing, have actually been around a long time. In fact, we installed our first batch of those in 1997. One of the more exciting things that's happened in just the last few years is that the cost of solar electricity has gotten really low. Now if you build a solar power plant, the kilowatt-hour cost of solar is actually cheaper than the kilowatt-hour cost of coal, and yes, the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum figured this out and they, therefore, put solar panels on their roof. Let's think about buildings. Buildings account for 38 percent of all CO_2 emissions and they consume a lot of electricity, 73 percent of electricity consumption. So buildings are a big part of our energy use. What do you do about that? First thing and you all have probably already worked this pretty hard, you become energy-efficient. When you're building a new building or even doing a major retrofit, it pays to spend the most effort on making it energy-efficient, reducing heat loss, putting in energy-efficient electrical fixtures and lights, doing all those things to use less energy. That is the least expensive thing you can do to reduce energy use. Then, once you've done that, you can consider renewable energy on top of that to serve the load. I put up LEED, you can get certified in that. There's a lot of ways of doing that, and now there's even a LEED certification for solar. So there's just some of the LEED certifications and that link from the US Green Building Council, you can go to find out all the details. When you're building new, think about how to make solar aesthetically pleasing. For a long, long time, solar has meant adding on these rectangular panels on top of an existing roof or on a wall. Well, now, there are solar shingles of various kinds so that it can actually become the roofing. Even with panels themselves, if you plan for that, you can make something aesthetically pleasing. There's even rounded tile-like solar roofing and then Tesla's working on another solar Kyle kind of roofing that looks like slates. A few pictures of what people have done. They've also built it into sides of buildings. We try to make it aesthetically pleasing anyway, even if it's just on top of the roof. But when you're building new, you build it in. I once saw a house that was built in 1977. They built in solar hot water heating into the roof to heat the whole house, and after we went to do some repair on it 30 years later and the only thing that needed to be repaired was a $80 pump. So it's a very durable thing. It can last a long time. Some other ideas for buildings, most of these are photovoltaics. There's also some solar siding that you can get, which is actually solar hot air that can heat the building. There's solar skylights. These are actually pretty popular in Europe and there's a company right in Poughkeepsie, New York that makes these. They make custom glass with solar cells built-in. You can choose how much light you want to get through versus how much you want to convert to electricity and have them build the glass for you that does what you want, and it looks really neat. There are several companies making solar roofing out of single crystal solar cells. CertainTeed is one of them, Dow is another. The solar skylights are still readily available. One nice advantage of solar roofing is there's less point loading on your structure. With solar panels, you got to build a rack and you got to have a rack feet that are going to be attached to the rafters or structural beams of the building. With solar shingles, usually, those are just attached to the sheathing like regular shingles. However, aesthetics costs money as you know. If you just want something to generate electricity, build a 500-megawatt power plant out in the desert and then you'll get really cheap electricity. But if you want to have something pretty, then that always cost more. Solar shingles cost about three times more than solar panels per watt at this point. Now that's going to change over time as they produce more of them. The only reason they're more expensive at this point is because they're not mass-producing them to the level that they're mass-producing panels. So at the moment, they are more expensive. They do replace regular roofing, so there's a little bit of savings there. But the market for solar roofing is still somewhat small because customers have to be ready for new roofing and solar at the same time. But again, as we're thinking about building new, and I know in California they do have some rules now that some new construction has to have solar built into it, it's not that expensive for a home. It's something like $10,000 to build solar into your new house. Most new houses are probably a couple $100,000, so that's a pretty small amount to add in to have solar. When you do that, essentially the house then is generating its own electricity and the new owner of the house is going to have a very small electric bill from the utility. So that a little bit extra costs on solar is going to save them a lot of money over the years from paying the utility. The cost per kilowatt-hour for a small system is always going to be greater than for a power plant. Right now, a 500-megawatt power plant can give you electricity for actually, it's less than $0.04 per kilowatt-hour now. Coal is producing about $0.06. So that's why coal is on its way out. But a home system is more like $0.09, $0.10, $0.11 depending on if you have incentives or not. If you have some incentives, that can be $0.06 for your home one. So that $0.04 for the power plant, that's with no incentive. The solar industries you probably saw in some of the earlier presentations has been growing like crazy. There has been a federal tax credit, but that's really the only incentive solar has had from the federal government. So it's at the state level that things have really been cooking. Now there's a lot of pieces to the industry and there's a lot of job opportunities. I tend to think of jobs in terms of solar installers. Those are all local jobs. You can't outsource those elsewhere, so that is where many of the jobs in the US come from. But, of course, there are also manufacturers and there are people like the architects and engineers who are now designing these systems and many other places where jobs are growing in solar. It's just going to get bigger. It's getting bigger so fast, it's hard to keep up. In fact, probably six months from now, you'll have to take a refresher class to see what's new, especially with codes.
